


Red Swallows White

by dining_alone



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Anal Sex, Dark, Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-25
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-21 08:10:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/897961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dining_alone/pseuds/dining_alone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You can't fight your body, no matter how hard you try."</p><p>After the fall, Sherlock finds himself in a situation he did not anticipate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Swallows White

It’s been one year and one day since the fall.

Sherlock stands in a Washington D.C. hotel room, taking a drag on a cigarette, blowing smoke out the open window. It’s one of the few vices he’s allowed himself during this time off the grid. The hotel probably doesn’t allow it, but minor rule-breaking fits well with his current role.

Not the best city for a smoking habit. Even this late at night, the humidity here is oppressive. Earlier in the day, heat shimmered over the grass as Sherlock stared up at the Washington monument. The structure was pointlessly phallic, the day unreasonably hot. He feels a twinge of nostalgia for London, and he indulges in one of his other permitted vices: thinking of Baker Street, and of John.

He considers taking off his clothes. He assumes that’s what he’s supposed to do at this juncture. Mr. Hartman ( _please, call me Rich_ ) will emerge from the bathroom, and Sherlock will greet him in only his pants, maybe silhouetted against the view of the city at night for extra aesthetic appeal. Sherlock has never been especially vain about his body, but he is aware of the effect it has on others. Then he will go into the bathroom under the guise of “cleaning up” and retrieve the silencer-equipped handgun stashed in the toilet tank. He will burst back into the room and shoot Mr. Hartman in the head.

*

Mycroft’s people set it all up. They had known someone like Rich Hartman existed for years, but it was Sherlock who provided them with a name. Hartman was ostensibly the vice president of a mid-sized consulting firm. In reality, he was responsible for coordinating and managing around half of the human trafficking operations in the eastern United States. Mycroft’s cronies got wind of him when he began moving to expand his business across the Atlantic Ocean.  

Luckily, Hartman had no taste for his own imported stock. He frequented high-class escort agencies, and didn’t show a marked preference for either gender.  He was also notoriously picky. The agencies had countless stories of escorts he rejected on the basis of minor facial flaws or “poor muscle tone.”

Mycroft didn’t like the plan, but he bribed an agency all the same.  They rented a room at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, and Sherlock sat in the bar for almost an hour, pretending to drink a G&T (even more overpriced than in London) while he waited for the man to arrive. He wore tight black jeans and a lilac button-up. Rather than cutting his hair, he had allowed it to grow until it fit it into a small ponytail at the base of his neck. Chocolate-brown contacts completed the illusion. The other patrons at the bar—mostly overpaid government contractors trying to relax or looking for somebody to fuck—eyed him curiously, but Sherlock did not return their gazes. He didn’t look up until Hartman entered the bar area.

Rich Hartman was a small man. _Around John’s height_ , Sherlock realized. But where John was sturdy, Hartman was thin and sharp-featured. Even though his hair had greyed and begun to recede, he was still conventionally attractive enough that paying for sex was a luxury rather than a necessity.

“You’re a little old for a rentboy,” said Hartman bluntly, stopping by Sherlock’s bar stool.

Sherlock smiled and raised an eyebrow. “I’m twenty-nine.”

“No way you’re under thirty. Although I have to admit, you’re pretty enough. Which agency sent you?"

“Prescott,” said Sherlock. “They’ve got us a suite on the top floor.”

He handed Hartman the key card to the suite. Hartman gave Sherlock an appraising look in return. “Finish your drink,” he said, before turning to walk off towards the lifts.

*

This is not the first time he’s had to kill a man. That particular hurdle came early on in his exile, in Brighton of all places. He shot the man in the back of the head and dumped his body in the English Channel. He stood there on the streetlamp-lit pier for a while afterwards, looking out at the dark water and detachedly wondering if he was meant to feel remorse.

He hears John’s voice in his head again. _You machine._ But when he thinks back to their last conversation, he feels like anything but.

“Close the goddamn curtains,” says Hartman, emerging from the bathroom. He’s naked apart from the towel wrapped around his waist. “And put that thing out.”

Sherlock crushes the cigarette butt against the glass and flicks it out the open window. He draws the curtains shut, then turns to face Hartman. His shirt and trousers lie neatly folded in the chair next to the bed. He’s wearing black Calvin Klein boxer briefs. Hartman’s eyes follow the clean lines of his legs up to the swell of his crotch. The man’s attraction wouldn’t have been more obvious if he had licked his lips.

“I’ll just be a few minutes in the bathroom,” says Sherlock. He pitches his voice even lower than usual, although the American accent he’s adopted somewhat spoils the effect.

In the bathroom, he takes off his pants and sets the water temperature to scalding. He steps into the shower and thinks of hot blood staining crisp hotel linens. When a sufficient amount of time has passed, he shuts off the water and towels himself dry. Then he opens the toilet tank with rehearsed silence.

It’s empty.

Dozens of possibilities flash through Sherlock’s mind in quick succession.

The first one, of course, is the worst case scenario. The agency only pretended to accept Mycroft’s bribe, and Hartman knows about the whole operation. The gun was either removed from the tank earlier in the evening, or it was never put there in the first place. Sherlock will come out of the bathroom, and Hartman will be waiting for him with a bullet and a smirk. It wouldn’t be difficult to cover up; no one mourns the already-dead.

Or maybe Hartman is exceedingly paranoid and had the room searched before arriving. Either way, the outcome will be the same for Sherlock.

He flits through the other potential explanations. Incompetence on Mycroft’s end? Unlikely. Frightened hotel staff? Improbable.

But staying in the bathroom solves nothing. Sherlock stands by the door and steels himself to rush Hartman if the man has a gun. It isn’t his first brush with death, and if he survives, it certainly won’t be his last.

He takes a breath and pushes the door open.

Hartman is still in his towel, lying on the bed with his back propped up against several pillows. His gaze flicks down to Sherlock’s crotch. “Why are you still wearing those?”

No gun. No _visible_ gun, Sherlock corrects himself. But Hartman’s expression betrays no hint of anything other than lust and impatience.

He could leave. He could walk out of the room right now, see whether Hartman tries to stop him. Flag down a taxi, catch a flight out of this godforsaken city. Almost 6000 kilometers to Heathrow, and then only another cab ride away from Baker Street.

No. If Hartman truly is ignorant of Sherlock’s identity, then leaving now will only create suspicion. And the man is already looking at Sherlock like he wants to pin him down and never let him up. Best to carry on with the charade.

Sherlock slides the pants off in a single fluid motion. The phrase “see anything you like” echoes stupidly in his head. Too many insipid films with John. Too many memories that should be deleted, or at least relegated to a sealed-off corner of his Mind Palace.

“Turn around,” says Hartman.

Sherlock turns. He hears the bed springs shift as Hartman approaches from behind. Then there are two hands (thin-fingered and uncalloused) kneading his buttocks. A sizable erection presses against him. One of the hands moves to cup his balls, while the other one slips past his sac and traces a single line of pressure up to his perineum. He feels Hartman’s cock twitch.

He’s done this before. In the years following his expulsion from university, he dabbled in what Mycroft had termed “recreational drug use and casual relations.” But Mycroft didn’t understand that the drugs were a necessary distraction from the restless, relentless boredom and _emptiness_ that came with hours spent in cramped London tower blocks, full of dull little people leading dull little lives, fucking and killing each other in the dullest possible ways. Casual, often anonymous sex followed the drugs naturally; the two vices ran in the same circles. And Sherlock found that when the chemical high crescendoed in his bloodstream, he would allow himself to be bent over tables and couches, to be filled again and again and brought to his own shivering completion.

Hartman pinches his left nipple. A small noise escapes Sherlock’s throat. There is no cocaine to distance the sensation this time.

“You like it,” says Hartman. It doesn’t sound like _dirty talk_ or a line from a pornographic film. It is a statement based on observable evidence. Sherlock is hard.

The hands leave his arse. There is the sound of a plastic bottle being uncapped, and the hands return with the wet kiss of silicone-based lubricant.  Hartman’s index finger draws a gentle spiral around his hole before slipping shallowly inside. He finds his target in no time at all: the firm little bundle of nerve endings that causes Sherlock to jerk against him.

After that, Hartman wastes no time stretching Sherlock out with two fingers, adding a generous measure of lubricant with each insertion. Sherlock hears the man lie back on the bed behind him. He hears the tear of a wrapper, and turns around to see Hartman rolling a condom over his erection.

“You know what to do,” he says.

There is a prepaid phone at the bottom of Sherlock’s suitcase. There is a number he can text and a code word that will act as an S.O.S. It was all Mycroft’s idea; Sherlock isn’t much for contingency plans.

Suddenly he becomes very aware of his waning erection and the wetness between his arse cheeks. He can’t help but glance toward his suitcase, which rests against the wall on the other side of the room. If only he could make some sort of excuse to get to that phone….

“ _Now_ , if you don’t mind,” says Hartman.

Sherlock minds, even though he knows he shouldn’t. It’s just transport, after all. Just a means to an end. And without the gun, his endgame is convincing Hartman that this is nothing more than a routine encounter with a sex worker. It’s a role he must play, an obstacle he must overcome before he can go back to Baker Street and John.

It’s difficult to contort his facial muscles into the requisite cocky grin, but he manages anyway. He walks— _saunters—_ over to where Hartman lies on the bed. Then he takes the man’s prick in hand and gives it a few slow pumps. He expects Hartman to close his eyes, but his gaze remains fixed on Sherlock.

Sherlock straddles him. He teases the head of his cock with his entrance, because he remembers other partners liking that. After a moment, he sinks down.

It hurts. In the past, the drugs blunted the harsh reality of penetration, but now he feels every inch of Hartman’s prick as it enters him. He stays there, fully seated for a little while, expecting Hartman to tell him to get on with it.

No such order comes. Sherlock gives a tentative roll of his hips and sucks in a breath as the intrusion grazes his prostate.

That won’t do. He angles himself differently and rolls his hips again. To his relief, there is no burst of sensation this time. He plants his knees on the bed and sets up a quick rhythm, hoping to end this as soon as possible.

He feels a hand tighten around his wrist.

“No,” says Hartman. “Go back to what you were doing before.”

Sherlock pauses. He affects a look of confusion, but his heart is racing.

“Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t suit you.”

Sherlock hesitates, then readjusts his angle and starts to move. Now each stroke scrapes against his prostate, and he’s finding it hard to think, hard to analyze, hard to do anything but keep chasing the rising pleasure that slowly suffuses his limbs. He speeds up because he wants to. He needs to feel more and he needs to feel it faster. His cock is hard and leaking now, bouncing up and down with his movements. Hartman grabs it before flipping them both over, leaving Sherlock underneath him. Then he begins to fuck Sherlock with vicious accuracy, and Sherlock can’t stop the crest of sensation from overtaking him. Hartman gives his prick a few rough strokes, and the wave breaks. When he makes it back up to the surface, the other man has already spilled inside him.

Sherlock wants to roll away immediately, but Hartman’s weight traps his hips. The man grabs his chin and captures Sherlock’s bottom lip with his teeth, sucking and biting until Sherlock has to suppress a shudder of revulsion. When Hartman finally moves away, Sherlock closes his eyes and tries to school his expression into something more calm and collected.

“You know,” he hears Hartman say, “I wish you hadn’t worn the contacts. I wanted to see those pretty blue eyes when I made you come.”

Sherlock’s eyes fly open. There is a gun pointing at his temple.

Of course. It was stupid of him to assume for even a second that Hartman didn’t know. The missing gun was the biggest tip-off, but there were a thousand other little signs along the way that he missed entirely. If only he hadn’t lost control, had kept his wits about him when—

Hartman interrupts his train of thought. “I wasn’t expecting you to like it. The boss used to call you the virgin, after all. When I found out about your little plan—which was incredibly easy, by the way—your big brother has a security leak on his hands—I just thought I’d get to fuck a nice, tight hole for once. But I have to say, I enjoyed this a lot more.”

Hartman strokes Sherlock’s cheek with the muzzle of the gun, and there’s a sick sort of tenderness in his eyes.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it? You’re supposed to be so cold, so logical. But you’re sensitive, Sherlock. So responsive. You can’t fight your body, no matter how hard you try.”

“What do you want?” Sherlock croaks. He realizes it’s the first time he’s spoken since he discovered the gun was gone.

“I want the same thing Moriarty wanted. I want you out of the way. Part of me wishes I could just keep you tied down and fucked open in the dark somewhere, but we both know you’re too clever to stay kidnapped for long. No, it’s better to end it like this.”

Hartman clicks off the safety.

“I bet your doctor will miss you. If nothing else, he’ll miss that perfect ass of yours. But he won’t have to miss it for long.”

_John._

It happens in a matter of seconds. Rage and muscle memory take over (disarming techniques were some of the first moves he learned in his martial arts classes), and suddenly the gun is in Sherlock’s hands, pointing at Hartman and shaking in his grip. Blood mingles with the semen on his chest; Hartman must have fired and grazed him.

“Don’t—” Hartman begins.

Sherlock shoots him once in the chest, missing his heart, and then twice in the head. Blood blooms over white sheets and pillows, just the way he imagined it would.

He spends the next few minutes gazing at Hartman, watching red swallow white beneath his limp form. Then Sherlock gets up and retrieves the phone from his suitcase. With steady hands, he types out a belated S.O.S.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta'd, not britpicked.


End file.
